Abstract

Cumulative cultural evolution in humans is the process through
which behaviours gain structure and complexity as they are transmitted from one
generation of learners to the next. A central challenge in the cultural evolution
literature is to understand how the unique computational principles of human
cognition scaffold the emergence of complex behavioural systems. I explore how
the human ability to make inferences at higher order levels of abstraction can
lead to cultural complexity, in two ways: by allowing initially independent
behaviours to gradually acquire group-like structure as new learners repeatedly
impose an expectation for statistical dependence; and by allowing inferences in
one domain to be rapidly transferred to new domains which share features at
higher-order levels of abstraction. I model these processes in populations using
a probabilistic cognitive model for the acquisition of vowel systems in human
language.